I love a good, funny book. Particularly one where you honestly feel as if you would very much enjoy being friends with the protagonist.

Perhaps the benchmark in this genre is Helen Fielding’s brilliant Bridget Jones’ Diary, which brings us a heroine who is both funny and relatable. A woman who, for all her romantic adventures, can ultimately be defined by her witty social observations.

But long before I learned of Bridget’s big knickers and taste for chardonnay, I fell head over funny bone for the one and only Georgia Nicolson.

It’s truly a strange thing to be told you don’t have the ability to be funny. Not you as a person, but your entire gender.

I’m sure other women can relate to sitting stony-faced at a party while some smug so-and-so rabbits on about women only being capable of joking about their periods. About not really liking that many female comedians except, they will concede, maybe Sarah Millican.

Because to be funny is to be human, and to suggest that a woman cannot be funny implies that she is somehow less than, that her brain doesn’t have the necessary spark of electricity to perform magic with language.

And because, of course, you know yourself from your own lived experience the amount of times you’ve laughed with your female friends until your faces are streaked with tears.

You remember the times when you’ve had to run to the toilet before you wee yourself, or the nights when you’ve had to give up and lie down in the road because your jelly legs can no longer hold your body upright.

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging – and the many hilarious sequels – gives testament to that time in your life when, if you are lucky, you will laugh more than will be possible or practical at any other point in your life.

Written by the wonderful Louise Rennison, who sadly died in 2016 at the age of just 64, the first book was published 21 years ago today. For generations of schoolgirls, this will have been the very first book that had them cackling out loud. I know it was for me.

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging kicks off with 14-year-old Georgia, a dry, charismatic and rather self-absorbed teenager whose quick comebacks are matched only by her acerbic diary entries.

The lens through which we see Georgia’s life is pretty surreal, exaggerated and very much in line with the way you all too often do view the world at that age.

The adults around her are shown to be preposterous and impossible to comprehend, from her overly flirtatious mother to the bafflingly unreasonable teachers at ‘Stalag 14’. Boys she fancies on the other hand, are elevated to the status of ‘Sex Gods’.

Her cat is supernaturally enormous and terrifying, her little sister feeds her saucers of milk and the world contrives against her in a way that is woefully unfair.

To this day, the book’s vibrant vocabulary has seeped into my subconsciousness, with words such as ‘nunga nungas’, ‘nuddy pants’ and ‘nippy noodles’ still wriggling their way to the surface every now and then during chats with old members of my own Ace Gang.

I also find myself recalling certain nuggets of Georgia wisdom at dreadfully inappropriate moments, my mind wandering to the ‘snogging scale’ while on an actual ‘nervy b’ date with an actual adult man, or musing over whether I could fit a pencil case under my own bassoomas.

Rennison’s writing is distinctive and electric, giving the feel of actually having fallen from the mind of a particularly witty teenager. I remember feeling very surprised indeed when something clicked in my brain and I realised it had been written by an actual adult woman.

For a taste of Rennison’s sparkling writing, here’s one typical passage from It’s Okay, I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers:

I’d show him how much maturosity I had. At least I would if I managed to get in past the bouncers without them saying I was underage. I said quietly to Rosie and Jas and Sven, “Be really cool”.

That’s when Sven lifted me up under one of his huge Swedish type arms and shouted at the bouncers,
“Gut evening, I have the bird in the hand and one in the bushes, thank you!” and strode in.

I don’t know whether they let us in in because we looked mature or whether they were so amazed by Sven they didn’t notice us. Anyway, Operation Elastic Band was underway.

For those who – shockingly – are unaware of what Operation Elastic Band entails, this is a theory posited by Georgia about boys being similar to elastic bands.

As she explains in On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God:

First of all, they like to get all close to you like a coiled-up rubber band, but after a while, they get fed up with being too coiled and need to stretch away to their full stretchiness.

Then, after a bit of on-their-own strategy, they ping back to be close to you. So in conclusion on the boy front, you have to play hard to get and also let them be elastic bands.

This sort of half-logical scheming guides much of the plot, but it is the daft, everyday antics tying everything together that readers remember. Georgia’s olive costume and Rosie’s cigarette-singed fringe. Or when we find out, to Georgia’s glee, that Jas and Tom refer to each other as ‘Hunky and Po’.

Many of us of course will fondly remember descriptions of Angus terrorising Mr and Mrs Next Door’s poodles (“The size of a small Labrador, only mad”), or Uncle Eddie’s baldness (“an egg in leather trousers”), with Rennison’s inventive language creating a daft yet appealing world to escape into.

I was very plain and awkward at school, and was thus a million miles away from being cool in any shape or form. My happiest memories from this grey, uncomfortable sludge of time all involve me doubled up and snickering with my friends, desperately trying not to pee my knickers in public.

I couldn’t relate to the sleek, blonde cheerleader characters of sunny American high school movies. And I absolutely couldn’t connect with the achingly hip world of Skins, where teenagers were framed as being more knowing and eloquent than adults.

However, I could relate to the universe dreamt up within the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson books, which conveyed the language of giddiness known to all girls who once moved around inside the sort of close-knit friendship bubbles that must have seemed inexplicably bonkers to outsiders.

These books brought to life the bizarre nicknames and surreal code words of adolescence, the way one pointed word or look can send you into – probably unbearably annoying – shrieks of laughter.

The first book in Louise Rennison’s sidesplitting series Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging was written in 1999, a good few years before I would start borrowing from the teen fiction section of the library.

And yet, for me anyway, it is a text so melded with the time when I first started scrutinising every bit of my face in the mirror and wondering desperately, hopelessly, how to be normal.

In my mind it’s shelved right up there with Mardy Bum being blasted out at Battle of the Bands evenings, stripey emo socks hidden under school trousers, txt msg speak, and drawn out flirtations over MSN.

What’s more, the books actually helped alleviate some of the sharper humiliations of these years. For instance, when Georgia gets ranked a ‘four’ in the sort of grim looks scale I can recall all too well, I empathised, commiserated, but was able to see the situation as funny rather than harrowing.

Of course, there are some aspects that don’t hold up too well under a 2020 gaze, and the often cruel treatment of Nauseating P. Green or Wet Lindsay doesn’t exactly scream girl power.

But at a time when popular culture divided girls into studious Rory Gilmores or vain Regina Georges, it was refreshing to read about an ordinary, flawed, lively girl who shaves off her eyebrows and takes snogging lessons.

Girls in the new roaring twenties have been blessed with a variety of hilarious films and TV shows that focus on female friendships, with wildly successful gems such as Derry Girls and Bridesmaids passing the Bechdel Test with flying colours.

But back when I was tearing my way through Georgia Nicolson books, women were still fairly underrepresented in the world of comedy. Mostly found slotted in as a token guest on a panel show, or rolling their eyes humorlessly as the gross-out comedy star fired joke after joke.

The late, great Rennison was herself a comedy performer, with her first one-woman autobiographical show, Stevie Wonder Felt My Face, being heaped with awards and critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1980s.

Her other shows, which have a similar ring to them as the Georgia Nicolson book titles, include Bob Marley’s Gardener Sold My Friend and Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.

Quite rightly crowned ‘Queen of Teens’ in 2008 – the same year the movie came out – Rennison had great affection for teenage girls, a group that is all too often mocked, patronised and lectured to.

Writing on the official Georgia Nicolson website, Rennison said:

The main character Georgia is really based on my experiences of when I was 14. I wrote the book to make myself laugh. I always wrote what I remembered making me laugh when I was that age.

I didn’t attempt to teach. I didn’t attempt to do anything except I wanted Georgia to be a decent person. I wanted her to be someone who is a bit stupid and self-obsessed and difficult and funny and rude, and a bit jealous and all those other things. But I wanted her to have a good heart.

To borrow Georgia’s words, Rennison made us ‘laugh like a loon on loon tablets’. But more than this, she created a little paperback beacon for girls who liked making people laugh, but were constantly being told by society this was not going to be their role in life.

The Georgia Nicolson books were in some ways a bit of a fantasy, turning the often traumatic, painful years of adolescence in a playground of silliness, where ‘she who laughs last laughs the laughingest’.

However, they do touch upon those perfect moments when you get to forget about it all with your mates, when your bezerk, gross, messy inner self becomes something deeply, deeply funny rather than just simply embarrassing.

I will always love these books, and feel I can only end on a note of wisdom from the endlessly quotable Georgia:

When girls walk home we put on lippy and makeup. We chat. Sometimes we pretend to be hunchbacks. But that is it. Perfectly normal behaviour.

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